Cold Weather.

Hey, dark wintertime. This is the stuff. The neighborhood smells like woodsmoke. It's well below freezing. Might not have made it past 40 today. The cars don't want to turn over right at first. The dog's got about as much fur as you'd expect, which is to say, we are moving out of coyote territory and toward wolf. There's a lot of digging going on in here—on carpets, on sofas, on chairs. The dog is keen on making nests. The dog is preparing if not for hibernation then for something close to it.

No tree yet. We've got to get a tree in here, get lights on it. With no tree, how am I meant to settle for true and certain into the melancholy of the season? Hard to sit up in the childhood glow of little red and pink and green pinlights and put on music AMR won't generally let me listen to and sadsack my way through the last hour before bed if there's no tree to hang those lights on. We'll have to rectify this by the end of the weekend. Supposed to rain all day Sunday. That'd be a good day to already have the tree in here, a good day to untangle whatever lights I can pull from the attic, a good day to see what there is to be done about all of this.

I may have kicked the cold. I quit my whole damn life today and spent the day in bed. I finally got dressed at 8 pm. That, friends and fans of winter, will cure what ails you. I feel better, I think. I hope. We'll see.